In the wake of 9/11, the Bush Administration’s mantra became that no one could have imagined such an attack before it took place.
REPORTER: Why shouldn’t this be seen as an intelligence failure, that you were unable to predict something happening here?
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: Steve, I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.
DONALD RUMSFELD: First, I must say, I know of no intelligence during the roughly six plus months leading up to September 11 th that indicated terrorists intended to hijack commercial airliners and fly them into the Pentagon or the World Trade Towers. If we had had such information, we could have acted on it.
GEORGE W. BUSH: Nobody in our government, at least, and I don’t think the prior government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale.
But, like everything else the Bush Administration told the public about 9/11, this, too, was a lie. Not only had government officials “envisioned flying airplanes into buildings” or “using an airplane as a missile,” but multiple agencies trained for just such an event prior to 9/11. In fact, as General Richard Myers—Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2001 to 2005—went on to tell the 9/11 Commission, this precise scenario of a hijacked jet being flown into a high value target was drilled by NORAD not once or twice but five separate times in the run-up to September 11th.
On November 6th, 1999, they simulated an event in which terrorists hijacked a passenger jet flying out of JFK with the intention of crashing it into the United Nations building in New York.
On June 5th, 2000, they simulated two hijackings, one in which the terrorists intended to fly the plane into the Statue of Liberty, and the other in which the intended target was the White House.
An October 16th, 2000, NORAD drill saw a hijacker once again targeting the UN building, as did a nearly identical exercise on October 23rd of that year.
One of NORAD’s pre-9/11 hijack drills even saw the World Trade Center itself become the intended target.
Other exercises involved not just hijacked jets as weapons, but tested NORAD’s response to simultaneous hijackings being used in a coordinated attack on American airspace.
